The present invention relates to a semantic multilayer network and to establishing of the semantic multilayer network. In particular, the present invention relates to a method for establishing the semantic multilayer network, to use of the semantic multilayer network in further applications, etc.
In everyday life, large amounts of data and information have to be managed. The large amounts of data are unimaginable without the use of computing devices adapted to deal with the data through the use of several concepts for data structuring and representation.
For this reason, data representation by use of “social tagging” or ontologies has been provided. Characteristics of dynamic “social tagging” and of ontologies established or provided by engineers have been so far incompatible.
A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information or data (e.g., a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, or a video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information. The piece of information or data may be associated with several tags and vice versa. Describing of information or data by appropriate tags is called tagging. In particular, as regards tagging, an end user extends and changes within a continuous development process a vocabulary of tags within an application. During this process, a network of tags is established.
While using tags in such an organizational system is flexible and easy, tagging is not without its drawbacks. Disadvantages of tagging are, for example, absence of conciseness and structure (e.g., semantics) within the vocabularies (called among others tag clouds). Sources of said disadvantages are, for example, erroneous spelling, use of singular vs. plural forms, compositions of words with different separators (e.g., “-”, “_”, or “.”), abbreviations, synonyms, or multilingualism.
Further, typically there is no information about the meaning or semantics of a tag. This lack of semantic distinction in tags can lead to inappropriate connections between items. Additionally, selection and assigning of tags is a highly individualistic issue, as different people may use drastically different terms to describe the same concept, information, or data.
A further concept of knowledge representation in a computing device is ontology. An ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason automatically about the objects within that domain.
In the past or so far, an ontology was established and managed separately, i.e., out of application software or a package. In general, it is performed by use of tools for establishing or creating ontologies, wherein the tools are directed rather to experts of knowledge engineering than to end users.
Disadvantages of ontologies are, for example, the following facts: normally, ontologies may be created by knowledge engineers only; creation of ontologies requires especial ontology editors; creation of ontologies requires long time; and, due to high expenditure of time, the ontologies once created are adjusted or adapted only rarely.